|| It's a world
of reflections... of dimensions, where the past and present coexist in the
architecture, inhabited by ghosts and dreamers. Windows become murals, and
murals become windows. The place? Milan in the summer of 1960, in the boom of
its post-war reconstruction.

The camera gently
descends the black glass facade of a new tower as if you're in an external
elevator, can see the panorama of the city, the reconstruction zones between
established buildings, the railway tracks entering the modernist Stazione
Centrale like a demarcation between the old and the new. Reflections,
imagery... chance, form & dimension. As space becomes hallucinatory,
banality becomes art.

Cut To: a hospital
patient awakening in agony. This is Tomasso (Bernhardt Wicki), a writer who is
dying of cancer. A Doctor and a nurse arrive, inject him with morphine. He
moans, says, "What am I going to do?" He rolls to his right, stares through the
window at the building across the street, as if some sort of transcendental
escape is possible. The doctor picks up a novel from the bedside table,
examines the jacket....

Cut To: the street
outside the hospital. A small Alfa Romeo approaches, carefully navigating a
construction zone, avoiding a demolition bucket, then turns into a small
parking area. Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife Lidia (Jeanne
Moreau) get out, enter the hospital, take the elevator to Room 103. As the
doors open, you see a woman spying from her room just across from the elevator.
She slips out and calls to Giovanni, asks him for a light. There's a craziness
in her dark eyes, a tuberculin sexual hunger. Giovanni obliges. She says, "My
phone is out of order, I wonder if you...." A nurse appears, and she scurries
back into her room. Giovanni and Lidia continue to Room 103.

The visit with Tomasso
is a strange interlude, conducted in "real time" -- as indeed all of the action
to this point and thereafter appears to be -- with all the tension you would
expect in an encounter with the dying. The sound is ambient... modulated
conversation, a passing helicopter, the pop of a champagne cork as they drink
in honor of their doomed colleague. Tomasso's mother arrives, sits quietly in
the corner as her son and his friends reminisce. Tomasso has a copy of
Giovanni's latest book, "La Stagione" -- he says he's read 50 pages, feels it's
some of Giovanni's best writing. Speaking of himself, he says, "The advantage
of premature death: you escape success."

Tomasso is full of
gallows humor, nervous desperation, impeccable manners. Giovanni meanwhile is
like a sleepwalker... he murmurs, he defers... almost as if he is viewing a
double-figure in the bed, a dream version of himself. In fact, Tomasso's
self-doubt is a direct mirror of the malaise that you come to recognize in
Giovanni as the film progresses. Says Tomasso: "I regret that my presence has
spoiled so many delightful evenings... I wonder if I've ever done anything
useful... I lacked the courage to probe deeply... probably I never had enough
intelligence anyway."

The self-doubt of a
doomed animal is to be expected, yet the impotence within the despair is
typical of the European intellectual in the mid-twentieth century. Alienation
and the paranoid Self. The characters are awake in the existential moment, yet
wander through the action as sleepwalkers.

Antonioni used two
scriptwriters to help him develop the scenario for La Notte -- Ennio Flaiano
and Tonino Guerra -- and you wonder if they based this scene on the death of
Curzio
Malaparte who died in a Rome hospital in 1957 from lung cancer. Certainly
Malaparte would've enjoyed the surrealism in the following scene when Giovanni,
on leaving Tomasso's room, is lured into the nymphomaniac's room and molested.
Again, because of his passivity and the absurd contrast to his visit with
Tomasso, the action is dream-like, despite the documentary style of the
direction. She becomes a reincarnation of Tomasso, a Freudian personification.
Because the cine is black and white, and the characters and settings filmed on
location, the naturalism associated with Italian neo-realism subverts the whole
idea of fiction... just as the superb cinematography with its art school
geometrics and metaphysical symbolisms subverts the whole idea of documentary.

Giovanni rejoins
Lidia, who, overcome with sentiment, left Tomasso's room earlier. There is a
sense that she and Tomasso shared a special relationship, although its exact
nature remains circumspect. Giovanni immediately confesses the incident with
the crazy woman. Lidia dismisses it, says, "You were taken by surprise. Let's
forget about it." But Giovanni still feels the need to justify what happened.
Lidia, sotto, says, "Good story material. I'd call it The Living & The
Dead." This dead-pan witticism draws into focus the sub-text behind the
incident. The madwoman with her nympho desire is an existential trigger, a
proof of life. Yet despite the primal drama, resurrection eludes him.

They drive to the
offices of his publisher [the famous Bompiani company] where the book launch
for his latest novel is underway. As Giovanni chats and signs copies, Lidia
lingers on the periphery, leans against a pillar, watches. All attention is on
Giovanni, even though he drifts through the ceremony like an afterthought,
connected yet disconnected. Lidia slips away unnoticed, starts walking through
the streets. Men appear... in offices, on the street... various classes of
workers, sexual possibilities, or accidental witnesses to her aimless stroll.
There's a similarity here to the sequence in Antonioni's previous film
L'Avventura
(where Claudia leaves her hotel in a small southern town, goes for a walk). In
fact there are so many similarities in this and other sequences that many
critics dismiss La Notte as a reprise of the controversial L'Avventura. The
similarities are in the psychology of the characters and in Antonioni's
painterly style. And while both films are travelogues of the soul, L'Avventura
is rural whereas La Notte is urban.

distant tracks
arrive in the present

Lidia's amble takes
her to a suburb where she and her husband started out. She witnesses a fight
between two punks on a waste lot. She watches some young men firing model
rockets in a field. As dusk approaches, she has a drink in a small bar, then
phones Giovanni, who has long ago returned to their chic apartment and is now
prowling the darkened rooms. He drives to their old district, and they engage
in some mutual sentimentality about the area. Lidia is either watching him or
waiting for something to happen. Consciously or unconsciously she has drawn her
husband here to rekindle their early affection and intimacy. You see them
beside a old wall and a stretch of overgrown railway tracks, another setting
which suggests much more than mere documentary. Antonioni is a symbolist, his
imagery metaphysical. [his protagonists are always suffering from
disengagement, represented by disappearing women, and intimidation by the
supernatural] Here, the past is almost obscured, the track abandoned... and yet
you might recollect the opening of the film where the distant tracks arrive in
the present.

They return home.
Lidia takes a bath, puts on a new dress. The banality of it, the pure quotidian
-- the stuff that would remain off-stage for most dramatists -- continues.
Montage is not an option for Antonioni. His real-time action is an extension of
live theatre, just as his sophisticated cinematography is an extension of
theatre set-design... itself an extension of mural/fresco painting.

They stop at a night
club, watch some erotic choreography by a couple of African dancers. This scene
is reminiscent of one in Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
(1960), filmed the previous year with Marcello Mastroianni in the lead. But not
only do Fellini and Antonioni share a leading man, they also share a script
writer: Ennio Flaiano. It's Flaiano's sophisticated dialogue with its dry
edginess and Pirandelloesque sub-text that make their films of this period
appear to be the work of a single auteur.

As usual, the
night-club scene is masturbatory, suggests decadence through ennui. Faintly
narcotic, definitely cynical, it's the reinvention of a song-and-dance
interlude in live theatre. The choreography is ancient, although the spin is
modern. Again, Giovanni fails to be aroused. It's now late in the evening and
they proceed to the party which is somewhere on the outskirts of Milan in a
huge contemporary villa owned by a millionaire industrialist. Perhaps you sense
that Lidia is steering her husband into situations that might draw them closer
together... but of course every time they enter a crowd, they move further
apart.

Antonioni and crowds:
Dwight MacDonald, who wrote better than anyone on the films of this period when
they first appeared, says, "He is the Veronese of films, a master of calculated
composition. His groupings are, like Veronese's, both austere and luxurious,
classical in design but baroque in surface and texture. He is able to show a
complicated scene without any cluttered effect." (Antonioni: A Position Paper)
Nowhere do you see this talent for dramatizing large groupings better than in
the villa sequences, although the Stock Exchange sequences in his next film
L'Eclisse (1962) are also very good. Dramatically, the choreography in both
instances is for the same purpose, that is, the point-of-view of an outsider
looking in.

In L'Eclisse, the
Monica Vitti character hangs around the fringes of the stock exchange floor
watching her mother trade. In La Notte, Jeanne Moreau drifts through the edges
of the party watching her husband socialize and flirt. In both dramas, there is
a failure to engage and a longing for love. The naturalism is as impressive as
the alienation is modern. No one in contemporary film has ever matched
Antonioni in showing loneliness in the social context of a large gathering.

do you still hang
around with intellectuals

When they enter
Gherardini's villa, no one seems to be around. "Are they all dead?" says
Giovanni as he and Lidia pass through the empty rooms. Appropriately, he sees a
copy of The Sleep Walkers, wonders who here would read it. While this is a
setup for his later encounter with Valentina (Monica Vitti), the daughter of
the Gherardinis, it's also a metaphor for the milieu he inhabits. This is
reinforced when they step outside, and Lidia meets an old friend from her
schooldays who says, "Do you still hang around with intellectuals?"

Giovanni meanwhile
encounters a blonde woman -- Signorina Resy -- who says, "I'm your greatest
admirer in Italy... I'd like a novel about a woman who loves a man... but the
man doesn't love her. But he does admire her intelligence and her character.
They live together... but how could such a story end?" Giovanni says politely,
"It could end many ways." You wonder if he recognizes the analogy here to his
own relationship. You certainly do, as by now you are also wondering how this
story can end. Will another mad woman step out of the shadows and seduce him...
and would anyone care. Still, the voyeurism sustains us, replete as it is with
post-modern irony and ambiguous visual realities.

reflection

Once again Antonioni
explores the use of reflection as a means of visual sub-text by using the
extensive glass surfaces that make up the walls of Gherardini's designer villa.
Despite the rationalist architecture of glass, steel and concrete, the
irrational functions as a supernatural counterpoint. When Giovanni watches
Valentina amusing herself with a game of solo bocci (shuffleboard) on the
patterned tile floor you see him as a reflection in the plate glass. And what
you see, really, is a spacializing of the past and the present, as there is a
Renaissance landscape mural on the wall. This natural multiple exposure has
about it the stuff of spirits, the sense of passing from one world to
another... of romanticism and idealization. Symbols abound. In the garden the
patrician Gherardini admires his roses, and a cat is transfixed by the
disembodied head of a statue on the grass. It's indeed fitting that Lidia slips
away, phones the hospital, finds out that Tomasso has died.

It's now raining
heavily. Disheartened, Lidia allows herself to be spirited away by Roberto, a
lead-footed Cassanova in a coupe. They drive through the night, an
impressionistic blur in the downpour. They stop for the lights at a
level-crossing, get out of the car, dally. A passenger train glides past.
Roberto attempts to kiss her but Lidia disengages, abandons the Hemingway rain,
gets back in the car. Roberto returns her to the party.

She knows Giovanni is
making love to Valentina. She knows this because she gave him to her. She knows
Valentina is reading The Sleepwalkers, is vulnerable. But despite all the
head-talk and a couple of half-hearted kisses, nothing comes of it.
Instinctively, Valentina knows he's a dead soul. Although she won her "game"
(of bocci) with Giovanni, she says sadly, "At least I'm clever enough not to
break up a marriage." She adds, "Now you can spend the rest of the evening with
your wife." Giovanni protests, then concludes, "It's so dark. How can I find
her?" Thus Giovanni is left with his own reflection in the rain-streaked glass.

a melancholy
shuffle of weariness

Excluding death, it
becomes obvious that the action can only be resolved by metaphor... and when it
comes, it better be good. First, Giovanni refuses Gherardini's offer of an
executive position in his company. While he doesn't need it, this becomes
another example of the artist's inability to commit. There's a verbal
confrontation between Lidia and Valentina, but quickly they decide they
actually like one another. As the dawn breaks, Lidia tells Giovanni that
Tomasso is dead. As they walk away from the villa, the jazz combo is still
playing in the garden, a slow and melancholy shuffle of weariness as if the
cruise ship has left without them. Signorina Resy, rejected by all the men,
consoles herself with a woman on a bench. So it goes. The surrealism is in the
muted light and the banality of the lateral events.

Giovanni and Lidia
walk onto the private golf course, keep going until they reach a sandtrap.
Lidia takes a typed page from her purse, reads what is a de facto love
rhapsody, then weeps. Moved, Giovanni says, "Who wrote that?" and Lidia
replies, "You did." Finally, after a long day's journey into night and beyond,
Giovanni is aroused. He embraces his wife, pushes her to the ground, she
protesting. He climbs on top of her, and they roll in the sand. Up music and
exeunt on the long view.

Mastroianni's
restrained performance as Giovanni has been criticized in the past, even though
passivity and creative frustration is what defines his character. This
passivity is often a sign of the child-man, a role Mastroianni plays to
perfection. Here he looks like a boy in a man's suit, and he relates to his
wife Lidia with the affectionate indifference of a boy to his mother. As an
intellectual, his role is anti-dramatic, lacks physicality. This isn't just a
question of a bourgeois type in Antonioni's films, as the mechanic played by
the American actor Steve Cochrane in Il Grido (1957) exhibits a similar sort of
passivity. Women become detached from the Antonioni "hero" -- just like mothers
relinquishing their sons. The sociology begs analysis, such as the modern
secular male detaching from the maternalism of Catholicism... or the childless
bourgeois artist in a hopeless search for fulfillment. Still, while Giovanni's
condition is a fact, its true nature remains as provocative as the symbolism of
Tomasso's death.

An obvious comparison
is to be found in Mastroianni's previous role, that of a playboy gossip
journalist in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Here again he plays a child-man, but a
man of action, even if that action is trifling. As "Marcello", Mastroianni
again finds himself as a man who is unable to commit, a man of talent
unrealized. As Giovanni, he finds his talent realized, and yet it brings him
nothing. Both characters are left on the edge of a spiritual abyss, studies in
the infantile self.

While the success or
failure of La Notte should rest only on a viewing of the film itself
(regardless of production politics), it will come as no surprise to fellow
voyeurs that Mastroianni thought it was a failure. "I didn't like the script of
La Notte. I never believed in the crises of my character," he says. Despite his
disenchantment with Antonioni [who was having an affair with Monica Vitti], he
says he agreed to do the film "Because at the beginning I had the impression
that the writer character was someone at the very edge of the conventional. He
reminded me of my writer friend Ennio Flaiano. But that wasn't Antonioni's idea
at all." As a consequence, Mastroianni got into a heavy dispute with the other
screenwriter Tonino Guerra. These quotes come from Donald Dewey's book Marcello
Mastroianni: His Life & Art, and while it all sounds like typical gossip
from a movie shoot, the detail about Ennio Flaiano should not be overlooked.

Ennio Flaiano
(1920-72) was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, theatre critic... editor of
Il Mondo... author of the superb novel Short Cut (1948) about Italy's Ethiopian
war, filmed in 1991 by Guiliano Montaldo as
Time To Kill
starring Nicolas Cage. Without question, Flaiano is the significant
intellectual force behind Antonioni's La Notte... and, as it happens, many of
Fellini's best: La
Strada, La Dolce
Vita, Otto e
Mezzo [8½]. Alberto Moravia, Flaiano's famous contemporary, says
about him: "Flaiano was a little man, originally from the Abruzzo, dark and
stubby, with a core of pessimism, of negativeness. He was witty, and he knew he
was, with keen intelligence.... As a writer, he oscillated between surrealism
and a British black humor." [as quoted in Life of Moravia].

It must be said that
Monica Vitti's role as Valentina is intriguing, if a bit indulgent. She seems
far too clever for an eighteen year old, too full of world weary wisdom even if
she is the sophisticated daughter of a millionaire. As for Jeanne Moreau, her
screen presence is perfect for the mystery within her character. But of course
she too didn't like her character or La Notte.